The Russian Church, Stoglav to the Eve of Nikon

In the century and a half after 1517 the Russian Church became something new: a national church with a patriarch of its own. A great council held in Moscow in 1551, its decisions arranged in a hundred chapters and so known as the Stoglav, tried to regulate everything from icon painting to the conduct of priests. In 1589 the visiting Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II consecrated Metropolitan Job as the first Patriarch of Moscow, making formal what Muscovy already believed about itself. Then came the Time of Troubles, when the state effectively collapsed and the church became the country's rallying point — Patriarch Hermogenes died in confinement rather than endorse a foreign claimant to the throne — and afterwards Patriarch Filaret, the young tsar's own father, governed alongside him. All of this stands immediately before the liturgical corrections of the 1650s that would tear the church apart.